by Stephen King
“What would I hear? I’m on the other coast. Hey, he’s okay, isn’t he?”
“He’s in the hospital with this flu bug. Captain Trips, they’re calling it out here. Not that it’s any laughing matter. A lot of people have died with it, they say. People are scared, staying in. We’ve got six empty tables, and you know Jane never has empty tables.”
“How is he?”
“Who knows? They’ve got wards and wards of people and none of them can have visitors. It’s spooky, Larry. And there are a lot of soldiers around.”
“On leave?”
“Soldiers on leave don’t carry guns or ride around in convoy trucks. A lot of people are really scared. You’re well off out where you are.”
“Hasn’t been anything on the news.”
“Out here there’s been a few things in the papers about getting flu shot boosters, that’s all. But some people are saying the army got careless with one of those little plague jars. Isn’t that creepy?”
“It’s just scare talk,” he said.
“There’s nothing like it where you are?”
“No,” he said, and then thought of his mother’s cold. And hadn’t there been a lot of sneezing and hacking going on in the subway—he remembered thinking it sounded like a TB ward. But there were plenty of sneezes and runny noses to go around in any city.
“Janey herself isn’t in,” Arlene was saying. “She’s got a fever and swollen glands, she said. I thought that old whore was too tough to get sick.”
“Three minutes are up, signal when through,” the operator broke in.
Larry said: “Well, I’ll be coming back in a week or so, Arlene. .We’ll get together.”
“Fine by me. I always wanted to go out with a famous recording star.”
“Arlene? You don’t know a guy named Dewey the Deck, do you?” “Oh!” she said in a very startled way. “Oh wow! Larry!”
“What?”
“Thank God you didn’t hang up! I did see Wayne, just about two days before he went into the hospital. I forgot all about it! Oh, gee!” “Well, what is it?”
“It’s an envelope. He said it was for you, but he asked me to keep it in my cash drawer for a week or so, or give it to you if I saw you. He said something like ‘He’s goddam lucky Dewey doesn’t own it instead of him.’ ”
“What’s in it?” He switched the phone from one hand to the other. “Just a minute. I’ll see.” There was a moment of silence, then ripping paper. Arlene said, “It’s a savings account book. First of California. There’s a balance of . . . wow! Just over thirteen thousand dollars. If you ask me to go somewhere dutch, I’ll brain you.”
“You won’t have to,” he said, grinning. “Thanks, Arlene.”
“Sure. I’ll put it in an envelope with your name on it. Then you can’t duck me when you come in.”
“I wouldn’t, sugar.”
They hung up and then the operator was there, demanding three dollars for Ma Bell. Larry, still feeling the wide and foolish grin on his face, plugged it willingly into the slot.
He looked at the change still scattered on the phone booth’s shelf, picked out a dime, and dropped it into the slot. A moment later his mother’s phone was ringing. Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it. He thought—no, he believed—that this was entirely the former. He wanted to relieve both of them with the news that he was solvent again.
The smile faded off his lips little by little. The phone was only ringing. Maybe she had decided to go in after all. He thought of her flushed, feverish face, and of her coughing and sneezing and saying “shit!” impatiently into her handkerchief. He didn’t think she would have gone in.
He hung up and absently removed his dime from the slot when it clicked back. He went out, jingling the change in his hand. When he saw a cab he hailed it, and as the cab pulled back into the flow of traffic it began to spatter rain.
The door was locked and after knocking two or three times he was sure the apartment was empty. He had rapped loud enough to make someone on the floor above rap back, like an exasperated ghost. But he would have to go in and make sure, and he didn’t have a key. He turned to go down the stairs to Mr. Freeman’s apartment and that was when he heard the low groan from behind the door.
There were three different locks on his mother’s door, but she was indifferent about using them all in spite of her obsession with the Puerto Ricans. Larry hit the door with his shoulder and it rattled loudly in its frame. He hit it again and the lock gave. The door swung back and banged off the wall.
“Mom?”
That groan again.
The apartment was dim; the day had grown dark very suddenly, and now there was thick thunder and the sound of rain had swelled. The living room window was half open, the white curtains bellying out over the table, then being sucked back through the opening and into the airshaft beyond. There was a glistening wet patch on the floor where the rain had come in.
“Mom, where are you?”
A louder groan. He went through into the kitchen, and thunder rumbled again. He almost tripped over her because she was lying on the floor, half in and half out of her bedroom.
“Mom! Jesus, Mom!”
She tried to roll over at the sound of his voice, but only her head would move, pivoting on the chin, coming to rest on the left cheek. Her breathing was stentorious and clogged with phlegm. But the worst thing, the thing he never forgot, was the way her visible eye rolled up to see him, like the eye of a hog in a slaughtering pen. Her face was bright with fever.
“Larry?”
“Going to put you on your bed, Mom.”
He bent, locking his knees fiercely against the trembling that wanted to start up in them, and got her in his arms. Her housecoat fell open revealing a wash-faded nightgown and fishbelly-white legs sewn with puffy blue varicose veins. Her heat was immense. That terrified him. No one could remain so hot and live. Her brains must be frying in her head.
As if to prove this, she said querulously: “Larry, go get your father. He’s in the bar.”
“Be quiet,” he said, distraught. “Just be quiet and go to sleep, Mom.”
“He’s in the bar with that photographer!” she said shrilly into the palpable afternoon darkness, and thunder cracked viciously outside. Larry’s body felt as if it was coated with slowly running cold slime. A cool breeze was moving through the apartment, coming from the half-open window in the living room. As if in response to it, Alice began to shiver and the flesh of her arms humped up in gooseflesh. Her teeth clicked. Her face was a full moon in the bedroom’s semidarkness. Larry scrambled the covers down, put her legs in, and pulled the blankets up to her chin. Still she shivered helplessly, making the top blanket quiver and shake. Her face was dry and sweat-less.
“You go tell him I said come outta there!” she cried, and then was silent, except for the heavy bronchial sound of her breathing.
He went back into the living room, approached the telephone, then detoured around it. He shut the window with a bang and then went back to the phone.
The books were on a shelf underneath the little table it sat on. He looked up the number of Mercy Hospital and dialed it while more thunder cracked outside. A stroke of lightning turned the window he’d just closed into a blue and white X-ray plate. In the bedroom his mother screamed breathlessly, chilling his blood.
The phone rang once, there was a buzzing sound, then a click. A mechanically bright voice said: “This is a recording made at Mercy General Hospital. At the time of your call, all circuits are busy. If you will hold, your call will be taken as soon as possible. Thank you. This is a recording made at Mercy General Hospital. At the time of your call—”
“We put the mopheads downstairs!” his mother cried out. Thunder rolled. “Those Puerto Rickies don’t know nothing!”
“—call will be taken as soon as—”
He thumped the phone down and stood over it, sweating. What kind of goddam hospital was that, where you got a
fucking recorded announcement? What was going on there?
Larry decided to go down and see if Mr. Freeman could watch her while he got over to the hospital. Or should he call a private ambulance? Christ, how come nobody knew about these things when they had to? Why didn’t they teach it in school?
In the bedroom his mother’s laborious breathing went on and on.
“I’ll be back,” he muttered, and went to the door. He was scared, terrified for her, but underneath another voice was saying things like: These things always happen to me. And: Why did it have to happen just after I got the good news? And most despicable of all: How bad is this going to screw up my plans? How many things am I going to have to change around?
He hated that voice, wished it would die a quick, nasty death, but it just went on and on.
He ran down the stairs to Mr. Freeman’s apartment and thunder boomed through the dark clouds. As he reached the first-floor landing the door blew open and a curtain of rain swept in.
Chapter 15
Stu Redman was frightened.
He looked out the barred window of his new room in Stovington, Vermont, and what he saw was a small town far below, miniature gas station signs and some sort of mill, a main street, a river, the turnpike, and beyond the turnpike the granite backbone of far western New England—the Green Mountains.
He was frightened because this was more like a jail cell than a hospital room. He was frightened because Denninger was gone. He hadn’t seen Denninger since the whole crazy three-ring circus moved from Atlanta to here. Deitz was gone, too. Stu thought that maybe Denninger and Deitz were sick, perhaps dead already.
Somebody had slipped. Either that, or the disease that Charles D. Campion had brought to Arnette was a lot more communicable than anyone had guessed. Either way, the integrity of the Atlanta Plague Center had been breached, and Stu thought that everyone who had been there was now getting a chance to do a little firsthand research on the virus they had been studying.
They still did tests on him here, but they seemed desultory. The schedule had become slipshod. Results were scrawled down and he had a suspicion that someone looked at them cursorily, shook his head, and dumped them in the nearest shredder.
That wasn’t even the worst. The worst was the guns. The nurses who came in to take blood or spit or urine were now always accompanied by a soldier in a white-suit, and the soldier had a gun in a plastic Baggie. The Baggie was fastened over the wrist of the soldier’s right gauntlet. The gun was an army-issue .45, and Stu had no doubt that, if he tried any of the games he had tried with Deitz, the .45 would tear the end of the Baggie into smoking, burning shreds and Stu Redman would cease to exist.
If they were just going through the motions now, then he had become expendable. He was under detention.
He had watched the six o’clock news very carefully, as he did every night now. The men who had attempted the coup in India had been branded “outside agitators” and shot. The police were still looking for the person(s) who had blown a power station in Laramie, Wyoming, yesterday. The Supreme Court had decided 6-3 that known homosexuals could not be fired from civil service jobs. And for the first time, there had been a whisper of other things.
AEC officials in Miller County, Arkansas, had denied there was any chance of a reactor meltdown. The atomic power plant in the small town of Fouke, about thirty miles from the Texas border, had been plagued with minor circuitry problems in the equipment that controlled the pile’s cooling cycle, but there was no cause for alarm. The army units in that area were merely a precautionary measure. Stu wondered what precautions the army could take if the Fouke reactor did indeed melt down. He thought the army might be in southwestern Arkansas for other reasons altogether. Fouke wasn’t all that far from Amette.
Another item reported that an East Coast flu epidemic seemed to be in the early stages—the Russian strain, nothing to really worry about except for the very old and the very young. A tired New York City doctor was interviewed in a hallway of Brooklyn’s Mercy Hospital. He said the flu was exceptionally tenacious for Russian-A, and he urged viewers to get flu boosters. Then he suddenly started to say something else, but the sound cut off and you could only see his lips moving. The picture cut back to the newscaster in the studio, who said: “There have been some reported deaths in New York as a result of this latest flu outbreak, but contributing causes such as urban pollution and emphysema have also been present in most of those fatal cases. Government health officials emphasize that this is Russian-A flu, not the more dangerous swine flu. In the meantime, old advice is good advice, the doctors say: Stay in bed, get lots of rest, drink fluids, and take aspirin for the fever.”
The sun was touching the horizon now, tinting it a gold that would turn to red and fading orange soon enough. The nights were the worst. They had flown him to a part of the country that was alien to him. In this early summer season, the amount of green he could see from his window seemed abnormal, excessive, a little scary. He had no friends; as far as he knew all the people who had been on the plane with him when it flew from Braintree to Atlanta were now dead. He was surrounded by unfriendly automatons who took his blood and pointed revolvers at him. He was afraid for his life, although he still felt fine and had begun to believe that he wasn’t going to catch It, whatever It was.
Thoughtfully, Stu wondered if it would be possible to escape from here.
Chapter 16
When Creighton came in on June 24, he found Starkey looking at the monitors, his hands behind his back. He could see the old man’s West Point ring glittering on his right hand, and he felt a wave of pity for him. Starkey had been cruising on pills for ten days, and he was close to the inevitable crash. But, Creighton thought, if his suspicion about the phone call was correct, the crash had already occurred.
“Len,” Starkey said, as if surprised. “Good of you to come in.”
“De nada,” Creighton said with a slight smile.
“You know who that was on the phone.”
“It was really him, then?”
“The old Georgia Giant himself. I’ve been relieved. The clodhopper relieved me, Len. Of course I knew it was coming. But it still hurts. Hurts like hell. It hurts coming from that grinning, gladhanding sack of shit.”
Len Creighton nodded. The night that man had been elected had been a night of horror for him, and for all thinking men.
“Well,” Starkey said, passing a hand over his face. “It’s done, anyway. You’re in charge now. He wants you in Washington as soon as you can get there. He’ll have you on the carpet and he’ll chew your ass to a bloody rag, but you just stand there and yessir him and take it. We’ve salvaged what we can. It’s enough. I’m convinced it’s enough.”
“If so, this country ought to get down on its knees to you.”
Starkey waved it away. “One thing is top priority. You’ve got to see Jack Cleveland, first chance you get. He knows who we’ve got behind both curtains, iron and bamboo. He knows how to get in touch with them, and he won’t stick at what has to be done. He’ll know it’ll have to be quick.”
“I don’t understand, Billy.”
“We have to assume the worst,” Starkey said, and a queer grin came over his face. It lifted his upper lip and made it wrinkle like the snout of a dog protecting a farmyard. He pointed a finger at the sheets of yellow flimsy on the table. “It’s out of control now. It’s popped up in Oregon, Nebraska, Louisiana, Florida. Tentative cases in Mexico and Chile. When we lost Atlanta, we lost the three men best equipped to deal with the problem. We’re getting exactly nowhere with Stuart Redman. Did you know they actually injected him with the Blue virus? He thought it was a sedative. He killed it, and no one has the slightest idea how. If we had six weeks, we might be able to turn the trick. But we don’t. The flu story is the best one, but it is imperative—imperative—that the other side never sees this as a ... an artificial situation created in America. It might give them ideas.
“Cleveland has between eight and twenty men a
nd women in the USSR and between five and ten in each of the European satellite countries. Not even I know how many he has in Red China.” Starkey’s mouth was trembling again. “When you see Cleveland this afternoon, all you need tell him is Rome falls. You won’t forget?” “No,” Len said. His lips felt curiously cold. “But do you really expect that they’ll do it? Those men and women?”
“Our people got those vials one week ago. They believe they contain radioactive trace particles to be charted by our Sky-Cruise satellites. That’s all they need to know, isn’t it, Len?”
“Yes, Billy.”
“And if things do go from bad to ... to worse, no one will ever know. Project Blue was uninfiltrated to the very end, we’re sure of that. A new virus, a mutation . . . our opposite numbers may suspect, but there won’t be time enough. Share and share alike, Len.” “Yes.”
Starkey was looking at the monitors again. “My daughter gave me a book of poems some years ago. By a man named Yeets. She said every military man should read Yeets. I think it was her idea of a joke. You ever heard of Yeets, Len?”
“I think so,” Creighton said, considering and rejecting the idea of telling Starkey the man’s name was pronounced Yates.
“I read every line,” Starkey said, as he peered into the silent cafeteria. “Mostly because she thought I wouldn’t. It’s a mistake to become too predictable. I didn’t understand much of it—I believe the man must have been crazy—but I read it. Funny poetry. Didn’t al—
ways rhyme. But there was one poem in that book that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind. It seemed as if that man was describing everything I dedicated my life to, its hopelessness, its damned nobility. He said that things fall apart, the center doesn’t hold. Things get flaky, Len. That’s what he meant. Yeets knew that even if he didn’t know anything else.”
“Yes, sir,” Creighton said quietly.
“The end of it gave me goosebumps the first time I read it, and it still does. I’ve got that part by heart. ‘What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’ ” Creighton stood silent. He had nothing to say.
